Soon after two o'clock in the morning, when the Russian war vessels ceased their thunder, the whole town was as one huge furnace, the intense heat and suffocating smoke from which caused the Russian Admiral to move his vessels towards the sea as quickly as the necessary soundings allowed.
The glare lit the sky for many miles around. The immense area of great burning buildings presented a magnificent, appalling spectacle.
It was a terrible national disaster—a frightful holocaust, in which thousands of lives, with property worth millions, had been wantonly destroyed by a ruthless enemy which Britain's defective and obsolete defences were too weak to keep at bay—a devastating catastrophe, swift, complete, awful.
CHAPTER XVI.
TERROR ON THE TYNE.
ngland was thrilled, dismayed, petrified. The wholesale massacre at Eastbourne and the terrible details of the bombardment of Hull had spread increased horror everywhere throughout the land.
Terror reigned on the Tyneside. Hospitals, asylums, and public institutions, crowded with affrighted inmates, had no food to distribute. In Newcastle, in Shields, in Jarrow, and in Gateshead the poor were idle and hungry, while the wealthy were feverishly apprehensive. A Sabbath quiet had fallen on the great silent highway of the Tyne. In those blazing days and breathless nights there was an unbroken stillness that portended dire disaster.